It boots, but sometimes has trouble due to those issues and I need to go into recovery mode. Super frustrating. After having tried a coupe distro, I just bag it. So today, I came across is again, figure “well, it’s been a few years, let’s see if I can try an updated version.” 2/
Ubuntu boot manager is like - “What Ubuntu do you want to boot?” “No, I put a Debian distro in the DVD and told you to boot from that.” Ubuntu: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What Ubuntu mode would you like?” “Dude. I told you to boot from the DVD. Stop taking over the boot order.” 3/
Ubuntu: “I didn’t see nothing. You want regular or recovery mode?” “Debian. I put in Peppermint. I f-cking want you to boot from the Peppermint disc.” Ubuntu: “Yeah, that’s not going to happen, bitch. So what’ll it be?” 4/4
Going to venture a guess that the problem isn't Linux, but instead is a dead lithium battery. If the machine is losing the time/date/boot order between reboots you'll get the symptoms you're describing from a windows 7 era. If it's the usual CR-2032, that's about a 75 cent fix to try it.
windows 7 era system*
Except when I press F2 to bring up the system bios, the boot order is the same as I set it and save the setting. It is certainly possible the little coin battery is on its last legs, but the boot order is correct in the bios screen. What might cause Ubuntu to over-ride this?
* when I previously set it
Something is letting it skip past the optical drive in the boot sequence, either the system isn't seeing that the DVD is bootable or it's not ahead of grub offering to boot Ubuntu. A dead battery can lose the boot order after a cold boot, as well as cause WIFI to fail if the date/time isn't set.
Is this a Dell or similar where you can do a one-time selection to boot the DVD with F12 when it first powers on?
Yeah, it’s disabled in the bios settings by default, but I turned it back on. I tried manually overriding but it didn’t work. The DVD is readable on another machine, but the older drive may be more fickle. I’m going to pull the hard drive, reformat it with another box and try again. No OS, no boot.
That's possible too, burnable DVDs came in DVD+R and DVD-R varities and not all drives during the Windows 7 era would read both. To get around it, either a USB optical drive or even putting the installation on a USB memory stick could work as well.